Inside Tai Tanzania: A learning tour on animation storytelling for impact
By Joshua Stephen
In one of the recently produced animations, a high-resolution dry leaves drop from a tree that is suffering from dryness. Grasses around the area have dried, most of the wetlands have dried with cracks.
As the short video dubbed “Kijani” starts, someone might feel it is a real produced film, not. It is an animation produced by high technology at one of the fast growing Tanzanian animation organisation, Tai Tanzania.
Like the past tours Nukta Africa team has visited, the learning tour was eye opening on the future of storytelling. As a digital media, visiting other organizations has been of advantage for us to learn more about what other colleagues are doing to improve lives through storytelling.
Visits can be useful in creating additional value as the parts of learning and exploring potential opportunities between two organisations. Yes, that is why we love learning tours even to what others would call them our competitors. Of course, we don’t have competitors but partners.
What did we learn from the Tai Tanzania visit?
When we do learning tours, we learn a lot. Like before, we would also like to share important issues we learned from our visit to Tai Tanzania.
Branding
We were amazed by their branding efforts. Their office has been branded well and designed to fit the much needed vibes for the youth.
This is what we have been pushing for ourselves and advising other digital media organisations as well in Tanzania. The Tai Tanzania team knows their brand well and tells their stories well from the communication team to technical ones. It is encouraging to see how youth-led are becoming too aggressive in branding nowadays.
At Nukta Africa as well we found ourselves obliged to tell our stories and simplify to our clients and partners who we are, what we do and why we do it. Who knows that a next door neighbour can possibly be your client and partner? That is why we are taking our branding more seriously now than before.
Partnership
Since the media industry is going through changes in adoption to technology, skills like data journalism, animation, fact-checking, multimedia storytelling and immersive storytelling are important learning aspects. We learned also at Tai Tanzania how they transform 3D animation in the country, an impact that has not been much spoken about.
Mariam Mhina, Tai Tanzania’s Communication and Partnership Manager, said the organisation has been in partnership with various organisations in delivering their mission.
The most encouraging part is that Tai Tanzania has embraced partnership as well with local and international organisations. In a world of constant changes and resource scarcity, partnership is paramount. Through partnerships your team learns and you gain both financial and other important project skills.
We can testify that partnership has also worked at Nukta Africa more than one would imagine. Our growth today is purely an outcome of partnership. We don’t have competitors at all.
Every person and organisation, even those we do similar activities, see them as our partners. They can complement us as an organisation or in saving other people who need service in the market.
Constant learning
Different media have various means of storytelling such as animation, virtual reality and augmented reality which are adoptive.
When we visited Ona Stories last year, we learnt about the use of immersive technology in storytelling but this year we learned something different at Tai Tanzania — animation storytelling.
“I never knew I could virtually experience places…this was made possible through a scan into an augmented reality,” Davis Matambo, a multimedia journalism trainee at Nukta Africa, said.
“The VR headset made me feel like I was in an actual wild park, and as the lion got closer on the screen I had sort of an adrenaline rush, you can wish to run. It is unlike the TV, it does not move you,” added Matambo from the University of Dar es Salaam School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Constant learning is part of values at Nukta Africa. It is easy to find reading and testing stuff in someone’s To-do-list in our organisation or a person is excited to attend a training session.
“In light of industrial future expansion, we had considered visiting other companies to learn from them and see how we can maximize our partnership,” said Mercy, Nukta Africa’s Sales and Marketing Officer who coordinates the learning trips.
We also found that even at Tai Tanzania, the team there love learning everyday like we do. It inspired us to continue producing impactful storytelling.
Adopt, embrace a vibrant culture
When we were entering the Tai Tanzania office in Mikocheni B suburban in the commercial capital, Da es Salaam, two beautiful ladies ushered us in. You could feed the vibe in their faces. They presented energy and hope. We loved the customer centric culture and that is what we have been embracing as well.
“Through visits you can learn better ways of producing your content and better ways of working,” Mariam Mhina, Tai Tanzania’s Communication Manager, said during our latest visit.
“Organizations should also consider having fun as a company value,” she said, adding that such culture has supported fast growth of their award-winning 3D animation and comic production organisation.
For Tai Tanzania, the strong culture helps innovation and fast track their mission of using animation for positive social behavioural change.
As Nukta Africans we also embrace fun and inclusion in our office that goes beyond tasks and extends to our special moment known as the Happy Hour, a lunch time, monthly team building activities, career talk, and retreat. Such practices bonds us to become a strong team as we chat, joke, laugh and learn from each other so that we can support each other.
What we have learned the hard way is that there are times we are likely to indulge into work in pursuit of the corporate goals and forget about our personal well being by resting and having fun.
As we left Tai Tanzania, we learned that they mean business in 3D animation in the country and such aggressiveness is needed for all youth-led organisations in Africa.
Nukta Afrika thrives to train and develop digital storytelling tools that are up to date. This is why we also capitalize in seeking knowledge beyond the lab by learning from other media through visits and how we can maximize the use of technology through learning and partnership.
The future can be blindingly bright if you are not well prepared. Step out of the bubble world.
